1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique for monitoring image forming devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
To maintain image forming devices such as copiers and printers, systems that monitor the occurrence of operational faults at the image forming devices at all times have been heretofore devised. In these systems, information about operational faults that have occurred is transmitted to maintenance workers through a screen display or the like to urge the execution of maintenance work on the devices. In the case where operational faults have occurred at plural image forming devices at the same time, the maintenance worker usually executes maintenance work in order of priority predetermined according to the order in which the operational faults have occurred or the natures of the faults. And further, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-313130, for example, has proposed a method of determining the contribution levels of image forming devices by assigning weights to the number of users of each image forming device, the degree of the importance for each user, and the degree of the importance for each provided function, and, the priority of maintenance work is determined by the contribution levels. In this method, the order of the maintenance work can be set based on the usage statuses of image forming devices before the occurrence of operational faults.
On the other hand, some recent-model image forming devices have a mechanism in which when some functions tend not to work well, the provisions of those function are halted and the other functions can be used continuously. The above mechanism, that is, an operation in which the provision of a particular function(s) is halted and the other functions are provided at image forming devices is referred to as reduction operation. Maintenance workers have to keep functions the provisions of which are halted ready to work so that the functions can be provided even at image forming devices in reduction operation as usual.
Each maintenance worker usually maintains many image forming devices. In that case, there is a possibility that the image forming devices in which the provisions of all functions are halted due to faults and the image forming devices in reduction operation are to be subjected to maintenance work at the same time. In the foregoing related art, however, it is assumed that image forming devices in reduction operation are not subjected to maintenance work, and thus the appropriate priority of the maintenance work cannot be determined.